Book Review : Bret Easton Ellis - Imperial Bedrooms (2010)
What keeps me interested — and it always does — is how can she be a bad actress on film but a good one in reality? (p.55)
Everyone feels the urge to revisit the past at some point. New perspectives are a normal byproduct of aging. It can either a good or a bad thing depending on the quality (and inherent trauma) of your past, but there definite danger at revisiting something you've been extremely successful at. Bret Easton Ellis writing a sequel so his beloved debut novel Less Than Zero counts as one of these dangerous occurrences. Imperial Bedrooms is quite maligned indeed, but I'm here to tell you it's actually pretty great?
Fuck what everyone else has told you.
In Imperial Bedrooms, Clay travels back to Los Angels for the casting of a movie called The Listeners, which he wrote the screenplay for. His old gang of braindead, narcotized socialites are still around and have all become involved with the film industry somehow. As he arrives, Clay immediately feels something is wrong and that he's being followed. Navigating the self-importance of his peers (and his own), Clay attempts to understand if he's in danger and why he can't feel home anywhere.
A Self-Investigation in Purgatory
I believe critics were predisposed to hate Imperial Bedrooms. With American Psycho and Glamorama being the exceptions, it’s always assumed (for some reason) that Bret Easton Ellis writes about his own life literally or metaphorically and critics hate an unpleasant narrator. But I don’t think it’s the case here. Modern Clay (Imperial Bedrooms) is not the same as Classic Clay (Less Than Zero). He's an unholy judgement on him. He's Bret Easton Ellis' judgement on his own early work and its ramifications.
Modern Clay is volatile and manipulative by design.
It is impossible to thoroughly understand Imperial Bedrooms without having read Less Than Zero first. As the latter depicts Classic Clay fighting for his soul in the failure of post-war America (and ultimately running away), the former is an admission of defeat. The carnal trappings of extreme privilege have pursued Clay wherever he went even if he once perceived himself to be above them. It's a you-can-move-the-guy-out-of-California-but-you-can’t-move-California-out-of-the-guy type of deal.
“Guys my age are idiots", she says, turning around "Guys my age are awful."
“I have news for you," I say, leaning into her. “ So are guys my age." (p. 51)
What I'm talking about California here, I mean the idea of California: Los Angeles, movies, opulence, beautiful people. These are things Clay despises and feels entitled to at the same time. He wants everything, but cannot commit to anything. This is masterfully echoes through Clay and Rain mutual pursuit of one another, each for their own selfish reasons. They’re both pursuing an idea that exists only in their head, leading to their respective existential unraveling. Their predicament is allegorical, not biographical.
If you don't feel at least a little bit concerned by that, you’re part of the problem and you probably hate Bret Easton Ellis because he’s trying to knock down a social system you're trying to uphold.
L.A: Liminal Hell
I also enjoyed Imperial Bedrooms from a purely stylistic point of view. His barren, minimalistic Los Angeles where billions of dollars in luxury infrastructure have been almost deserted by the living created a surreal, liminal landscape where his character could comfortable embody their allegorical role. A creature like modern Rip for example could only exist as a manifestation of the corrosiveness of California (as a "victim") in such setting. Modern Rip is a Cronenbergian monster living out his Hollywood dream.
In this version of Los Angeles, the line between life and death has become blurred. Clay annonces Julian's death at the start of the novel, but Julian is alive for most of it. That makes Imperial Bedrooms Clay's version of events and the novel's depiction of Los Angeles his own mental construction. The byzantine, luxurious hellscape is what Clay perceives and not necessarily what is. Every character evolves through their own private hellscape and that made Imperial Bedrooms insanely dynamic to me.
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Welp… I do think Imperial Bedrooms is one of Bret Easton Ellis' best novels? I’m really enjoying his twenty-first century self and how his perspective on his earlier, more bombastic work evolves and becomes more precise over time. There are very few writers, alive or dead, who write about existential defeat better than Bret Easton Ellis. The failure of the human spirit is a counterintuitive thing to appreciate, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't matter and that it isn't pertinent to the way we live now in 2024.
